Sentinel Interferogram of the 24/08/2016 seismic event in Amatrice, Italy

In the early hours of August 24th, a 10km-deep earthquake of 6.2-magnitude struck the Apennine regions of central Italy, near the town of Accumoli, in the province of Rieti. Around 200 aftershocks followed over the next several hours, including a 5.5 magnitude tremor. The death toll confirmed to 247 people and still rises, while the majority of the victims were from Amatrice town and hundreds more were injured. The quake caused serious damage to a number of towns and villages, with the worst affected towns to be Accumoli, Amatrice, Posta and Arquata del Tronto. Shortly after the earthquake, several descending and ascending Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B Synthetic Aperture Radar images were acquired, via ESA's Geophysical Exploitation Platform. They were combined to form interferograms that depict ground deformation due to the earthquake. The following maps show the fringe pattern associated with the event, where each color cycle demonstrates phase difference of [-π π], interpreted as ground deformation equal to 2.8 cm in the direction to the satellite.

~The BEYOND project Geo-hazard team

Figure 1 and 2: Fringe pattern of the 24/8/2016 earthquake, where each color cycle demonstrates phase difference of [-π π], interpreted as ground deformation equal to 2.8 cm in the direction to the satellite

Figure 3: This image captures that maximum subsidence was roughly 23 cm in the Line of sight (LOS) direction